Rod thought about it. “We’ll do that.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I was speaking rhetorically. I’m the delicate type. I sunburn easily.”
“You can take it easy and work up a tan. We’ll use your shirt as a signal flag. But we’ll keep the fire going, too. Not up on the shelf, but down there—on that mud flat, maybe.”
“And have the smoke blow right back into our summer cottage.”
“Well, farther downstream. We’ll make a bigger fire and a column of smoke that can be seen a long way. The flag we will put up right over the cave.”
“Thereby inviting eviction proceedings from large, hairy individuals with no feeling for property rights.”
“We took that chance when we decided to use a smoke signal. Let’s get busy.”
Rod picked a tall tree on the bluff above. He climbed to where the trunk had thinned down so much that it would hardly take his weight, then spent a tedious hour topping it with his knife. He tied the sleeves of Jim’s shirt to it, then worked down, cutting foliage away as he went. Presently the branches became too large to handle with his knife, but the stripped main stem stuck up for several meters; the shirt could be seen for a long distance up and down stream. The shirt caught the wind and billowed; Rod eyed it, tired but satisfied—it was unquestionably a signal flag.
Jimmy and Jacqueline had built a new smudge farther downstream, carrying fire from the shelf for the purpose. Jacqueline still had a few matches and Jim had a pocket torch almost fully charged but the realization that they were marooned caused them to be miserly. Rod went down and joined them. The smoke was enormously greater now that they were not limited in space, and fuel was easier to fetch.
Rod looked them over. Jacqueline’s face, sweaty and none too clean to start with, was now black with smoke, while Jimmy’s pink skin showed the soot even more. “A couple of pyromaniacs.”
“You ordered smoke,” Jimmy told him. “I plan to make the burning of Rome look like a bonfire. Fetch me a violin and a toga.”
“Violins weren’t invented then. Nero played a lyre.”
“Let’s not be small. We’re getting a nice mushroom cloud effect, don’t you think?”
“Come on, Rod,” Jacqueline urged, Wiping her face without improving it. “It’s fun!” She dipped a green branch in the stream, threw it on the pyre. A thick cloud of smoke and steam concealed her. “More dry wood, Jimmy.”
“Coming!”
Rod joined in, soon was as dirty and scorched as the other two and having more fun than he had had since the test started. When the sun dropped below the tree tops they at last quit trying to make the fire bigger and better and smokier and reluctantly headed up to their cave. Only then did Rod realize that he had forgotten to remain alert.
Oh well, he assured himself, dangerous animals would avoid a fire.
While they ate they could see the dying fire still sending up smoke. After dinner Jimmy got out his cards, tried to riffle the limp mass. “Anyone interested in a friendly game? The customary small stakes.”
“I’m too tired,” Rod answered. “Just chalk up my usual losses.”
“That’s not a sporting attitude. Why, you won a game just last week. How about you, Jack?”
Jacqueline started to answer; Rod suddenly motioned for silence. “Sssh! I heard something.”
The other two froze and silently got out their knives. Rod put Colonel Bowie in his teeth and crawled out to the edge. The pathway was clear and the thorn barricade was undisturbed. He leaned out and looked around, trying to locate the sound.
“Ahoy below!” a voice called out, not loudly. Rod felt himself tense. He glanced back, saw Jimmy moving diagonally over to cover the pathway. Jacqueline had her dart gun and was hurriedly pumping it up.
Rod answered, “Who’s there?”
There was a short silence. Then the voice answered, “Bob Baxter and Carmen Garcia. Who are you?”
Rod sighed with relief. “Rod Walker, Jimmy Throxton. And one other, not our class… Jack Daudet.”
Baxter seemed to think this over. “Uh, can we join you? For tonight, at least?”
“Sure!”
“How can we get down there? Carmen can’t climb very well; she’s got a bad foot.”
“You’re right above us?”
“I think so. I can’t see you.”
“Stay there. I’ll come up.” Rod turned, grinned at the others. “Company for dinner! Get a fire going, Jim.”
Jimmy clucked mournfully. “And hardly a thing in the house. I should have baked a cake.”
By the time they returned Jimmy had roast meat waiting. Carmen’s semi-crippled condition had delayed them. It was just a sprained ankle but it caused her to crawl up the traverse on her hands, and progress to that point had been slow and painful.
When she realized that the stranger in the party was another woman she burst into tears. Jackie glared at the males, for no cause that Rod could see, then led her into the remote corner of the cave where she herself slept. There they whispered while Bob Baxter compared notes with Rod and Jim.
Bob and Carmen had had no unusual trouble until Carmen had hurt her ankle two days earlier…except for the obvious fact that something had gone wrong and they were stranded. “I lost my grip,” he admitted, “when I realized that they weren’t picking us up. But Carmen snapped me out of it. Carmen is a very practical kid.”
“Girls are always the practical ones,” Jimmy agreed. “Now take me—I’m the poetical type.”
“Blank verse, I’d say,” Rod suggested.
“Jealousy ill becomes you, Rod. Bob, old bean, can I interest you in another slice? Rare, or well carbonized?”
“Either way. We haven’t had much to eat the last couple of days. Boy, does this taste good!”
“My own sauce,” Jimmy said modestly. “I raise my own herbs, you know. First you melt a lump of butter slowly in a pan, then you—”
“Shut up, Jimmy. Bob, do you and Carmen want to team with us? As I see it, we can’t count on ever getting back. Therefore we ought to make plans for the future.”
“I think you are right.”
“Rod is always right,” Jimmy agreed. “‘Plans for the future—’ Hmm, yes… Bob, do you and Carmen play cribbage?”
“No.”
“Never mind. I’ll teach you.”
8
“Fish, or Cut Bait”
THE DECISION TO KEEP ON BURNING THE SMOKE SIGNAL and thereby to call in as many recruits as possible was never voted on; it formed itself. The next morning Rod intended to bring the matter up but Jimmy and Bob rebuilt the smoke fire from its embers while down to fetch fresh water. Rod let the accomplished fact stand; two girls drifted in separately that day.
Nor was there any formal contract to team nor any selection of a team captain; Rod continued to direct operations and Bob Baxter accepted the arrangement. Rod did not think about it as he was too busy. The problems of food, shelter, and safety for their growing population left him no time to worry about it.
The arrival of Bob and Carmen cleaned out the larder; it was necessary to hunt the next day. Bob Baxter offered to go, but Rod decided to take Jackie as usual. “You rest today. Don’t let Carmen put her weight on that bad ankle and don’t let Jimmy go down alone to tend the fire. He thinks he is well again but he is not.”
“I see that.”
Jack and Rod went out, made their kill quickly. But Rod failed to kill clean and when Jacqueline moved in to help finish the thrashing, wounded buck she was kicked in the ribs. She insisted that she was not hurt; nevertheless her side was sore the following morning and Bob Baxter expressed the opinion that she had cracked a rib.
In the meantime two new mouths to feed had been added, just as Rod found himself with three on the sick list. But one of the new mouths was a big, grinning one belonging to Caroline Mshiyeni; Rod picked her as his hunting partner.
Jackie looked sour. She got Rod aside and whispered, “You haven’t any reason to do this to me. I can hunt.
My side is all right, just a little stiff.”
“It is, huh? So it slows you down when I need you. I can’t chance it, Jack.”
She glanced at Caroline, stuck out her lip and looked stubborn. Rod said urgently, “Jack, remember what I said about petty jealousies? So help me, you make trouble and I’ll paddle you.”
“You aren’t big enough!”
“I’ll get help. Now, look—are we partners?”
“Well, I thought so.”
“Then be one and don’t cause trouble.”
She shrugged. “All right. Don’t rub it in—I’ll stay home.”
“I want you to do more than that. Take that old bandage of mine—it’s around somewhere—and let Bob Baxter strap your ribs.”
“No!”
“Then let Carmen do it. They’re both quack doctors, sort of.” He raised his voice. “Ready, Carol?”
“Quiverin’ and bristlin’.”
Rod told Caroline how he and Jacqueline hunted, explained what he expected of her. They located, and avoided, two family herds; old bulls were tough and poor eating and attempting to kill anything but the bull was foolishly dangerous. About noon they found a yearling herd upwind; they split and placed themselves cross wind for the kill. Rod waited for Caroline to flush the game, drive it to him.
He continued to wait. He was getting fidgets when Caroline showed up, moving silently. She motioned for him to follow. He did so, hard put to keep up with her and still move quietly. Presently she stopped; he caught up and saw that she had already made a kill. He looked at it and fought down the anger he felt.
Caroline spoke. “Nice tender one, I think. Suit you, Rod?”
He nodded. “Couldn’t be better. A clean kill, too. Carol?”
“Huh?”
“I think you are better at this than I am.”
“Oh, shucks, it was just luck.” She grinned and looked sheepish.
“I don’t believe in luck. Any time you want to lead the hunt, let me know. But be darn sure you let me know.”
She looked at his unsmiling face, said slowly, “By any chance are you bawling me out?”
“You could call it that. I’m saying that any time you want to lead the hunt, you tell me. Don’t switch in the middle. Don’t ever. I mean it.”
“What’s the matter with you, Rod? Getting your feelings hurt just because I got there first—that’s silly!”
Rod sighed. “Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I don’t like having a girl take the kill away from me. But I’m dead sure about one thing: I don’t like having a partner on a hunt who can’t be depended on. Too many ways to get hurt. I’d rather hunt alone.”
“Maybe I’d rather hunt alone! I don’t need any help.”
“I’m sure you don’t. Let’s forget it, huh, and get this carcass back to camp.”
Caroline did not say anything while they butchered. When they had the waste trimmed away and were ready to pack as much as possible back to the others Rod said, “You lead off. I’ll watch behind.”
“Rod?”
“Huh?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What? Oh, forget it.”
“I won’t ever do it again. Look, I’ll tell everybody you made the kill.”
He stopped and put a hand on her arm. “Why tell anybody anything? It’s nobody’s business how we organize our hunt as long as we bring home the meat.”
“You’re still angry with me.”
“I never was angry,” he lied. “I just don’t want us to get each other crossed up.”
“Roddie, I’ll never cross you up again! Promise.”
Girls stayed in the majority to the end of the week. The cave, comfortable for three, adequate for twice that number, was crowded for the number that was daily accumulating. Rod decided to make it a girls’ dormitory and moved the males out into the open on the field at the foot of the path up the shale. The spot was unprotected against weather and animals but it did guard the only access to the cave. Weather was no problem; protection against animals was set up as well as could be managed by organizing a night watch whose duty it was to keep fires burning between the bluff and the creek on the upstream side and in the bottleneck downstream.
Rod did not like the arrangements, but they were the best he could do at the time. He sent Bob Baxter and Roy Kilroy downstream to scout for caves and Caroline and Margery Chung upstream for the same purpose. Neither party was successful in the one-day limit he had imposed; the two girls brought back another straggler.
A group of four boys came in a week after Jim’s shirt had been requisitioned; it brought the number up to twenty-five and shifted the balance to more boys than girls. The four newcomers could have been classed as men rather than boys, since they were two or three years older than the average. Three of the four classes in this survival-test area had been about to graduate from secondary schools; the fourth class, which included these four, came from Outlands Arts College of Teller University.
“Adult” is a slippery term. Some cultures have placed adult age as low as eleven years, others as high as thirty-five—and some have not recognized any such age as long as an ancestor remained alive. Rod did not think of these new arrivals as senior to him. There were already a few from Teller U. in the group, but Rod was only vaguely aware which ones they were—they fitted in. He was too busy with the snowballing problems of his growing colony to worry about their backgrounds on remote Terra.
The four were Jock McGowan, a brawny youth who seemed all hands and feet, his younger brother Bruce, and Chad Ames and Dick Burke. They had arrived late in the day and Rod had not had time to get acquainted, nor was there time the following morning, as a group of four girls and five boys poured in on them unexpectedly. This had increased his administrative problems almost to the breaking point; the cave would hardly sleep four more females. It was necessary to find, or build, more shelter.
Rod went over to the four young men lounging near the cooking fire. He squatted on his heels and asked, “Any of you know anything about building?”
He addressed them all, but the others waited for Jock McGowan to speak. “Some,” Jock admitted. “I reckon I could build anything I wanted to.”
“Nothing hard,” Rod explained. “Just stone walls. Ever tried your hand at masonry?”
“Sure. What of it?”
“Well, here’s the idea. We’ve got to have better living arrangements right away—we’ve got people pouring out of our ears. The first thing we are going to do is to throw a wall from the bluff to the creek across this flat area. After that we will build huts, but the first thing is a kraal to stop dangerous animals.”
McGowan laughed. “That will be some wall. Have you seen this dingus that looks like an elongated cougar? One of those babies would go over your wall before you could say ‘scat.’”
“I know about them,” Rod admitted, “and I don’t like them.” He rubbed the long white scars on his left arm. “They probably could go over any wall we could build. So we’ll rig a surprise for them.” He picked up a twig and started drawing in the dirt. “We build the wall…and bring it around to here. Then, inside for about six meters, we set up sharpened poles. Anything comes over the wall splits its gut on the poles.”
Jock McGowan looked at the diagram. “Futile.”
“Silly,” agreed his brother.
Rod flushed but answered, “Got a better idea?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Well,” Rod answered slowly, “unless somebody comes down with a better scheme, or unless we find really good caves, we’ve got to fortify this spot the best we can…so we’ll do this. I’m going to set the girls to cutting and sharpening stakes. The rest of us will start on the wall. If we tear into it we ought to have a lot of it built before dark. Do you four want to work together? There will be one party collecting rock and another digging clay and making clay mortar. Take your choice.”
Again three of them waited. Jock McGowan lay back and laced his hands under his head. “Sor
ry. I’ve got a date to hunt today.”
Rod felt himself turning red. “We don’t need a kill today,” he said carefully.
“Nobody asked you, youngster.”
Rod felt the cold tenseness he always felt in a hunt He was uncomfortably aware that an audience had gathered. He tried to keep his voice steady and said, “Maybe I’ve made a mistake. I—”
“You have.”
“I thought you four had teamed with the rest of us. Well?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You’ll have to fish or cut bait. If you join, you work like anybody else. If not—well, you’re welcome to breakfast and stop in again some time. But be on your way. I won’t have you lounging around while everybody else is working.”
Jock McGowan sucked his teeth, dug at a crevice with his tongue. His hands were still locked back of his head. “What you don’t understand, sonny boy, is that nobody gives the McGowans orders. Nobody. Right, Bruce?”
“Right, Jock.”
“Right, Chad? Dick?”
The other two grunted approval. McGowan continued to stare up at the sky. “So,” he said softly, “I go where I want to go and stay as long as I like. The question is not whether we are going to join up with you, but what ones am going to let team with us. But not you, sonny boy; you are still wet behind your ears.”
“Get up and get out of here!” Rod started to stand up. He was wearing Colonel Bowie, as always, but he did not reach for it. He began to straighten up from squatting.
Jock McGowan’s eyes flicked toward his brother. Rod was hit low…and found himself flat on his face with his breath knocked out. He felt the sharp kiss of a knife against his ribs; he held still. Bruce called out, “How about it, Jock?”
Rod could not see Jock McGowan. But he heard him answer, “Just keep him there.”
“Right, Jock.”
Jock McGowan was wearing both gun and knife. Rod now heard him say, “Anybody want to dance? Any trouble out of the rest of you lugs?”
Rod still could not see Jock, but he could figure from the naked, startled expressions of a dozen others that McGowan must have rolled to his feet and covered them with his gun. Everybody in camp carried knives; most had guns as well and Rod could see that Roy Kilroy was wearing his—although most guns were kept when not in use in the cave in a little arsenal which Carmen superintended.
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